I was once given press fleet vehicles to review for a magazine I wrote for. I was young and stupid, but most of all I feared if I wrote something too negative I would be taken off the list. I was getting a free car for the week that was worth more than what I made in a year. But, there are some journalist who go out on a limb and complain.

“I just finished a week in a $177,000 2014 Porsche Cayenne Turbo S, the German sports-car maker’s top-of-the-line, super-fast twin-turbo V-8-powered SUV. It’s a remarkable machine — sleek, ridiculously quick, crazy expensive and possessed of one quality that drove everybody who rode in the machine absolutely nuts. The brakes squealed like a poorly maintained diesel city bus.”

 

This is what Cars.com’s Aaron Bragman wrote about the Carbon Ceramic brakes on the Cayenne he was reviewing. This brake package has the fancy yellow calipers and is a more than $8,000 option. Bragman questions the logic of offering these as an option on luxury vehicles that may never see the race track.

“The noise made every stopping event more about figuring out how to modulate the brakes to prevent noise instead of enjoying the amazingly firm and fade-free properties of the huge stoppers. That’s not an attribute any car should have let alone a new six-figure one.“

I would hate to explain to a wealthy owner that ticking all the option boxes on a vehicle caused him to make for “less” of a vehicle that did not meet his expectation. But it seems that more and more six-figure cars and SUVs are offering this as an upgrade like Jaguar, Maserati and Chevy.

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